Unsurprisingly, the dairy Riverview plans to build on the Governor’s brothers’ land plans to receive subsidies from the Governor:
The dairy will need permits from the state Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources and Hamlin County Board of Adjustment. The project is applying for a Governor’s Office of Economic Development program that would refund up to $4.5 million of the sales and use taxes spent to build the project [Joshua Haiar, “$86 Million Dairy Proposed on Land Owned by Governor’s Brothers,” South Dakota Searchlight, 2023.10.04].
The Governor’s Office of Economic Development has doled out great churns of assistance for Riverview’s other South Dakota dairy projects. Most recently, the Board of Economic Development approved a $4.4-million grant under the Reinvestment Payment Program last February for Riverview’s Redstone Dairy in Kingsbury County, although Riverview spokesperson Martha Koehl tells me that that money, per the February 8 grant contract, goes to Kingsbury County, not to Riverview, and that Riverview thus did not receive that grant money from GOED.
Hamlin County thus appears to be in the chute to receive the next great county-CAFO bribe. $4.5 million would go a long way in Hamlin County: back in September, the Hamlin County Commission approved a provisional FY2024 budget with total appropriations of the general fund of $3,906,941.
The Reinvestment Payment Program states that it is for Projects that would not be built without these grants. Also, the payments go to the Projects owners. So does that mean that the only way these dairies are happening is because the SD taxpayers or users have to foot their bill? How does the Riverview spokesperson get by saying that Kingsbury County gets the payment? They are not the Project owners. https://sdgoed.com/public-records/reinvestment-payment-program/
Give me 4.5mill and I’ll build something i wouldnt have otherwise built.
I go back to my first thought, a bribe in plain sight… With taxpayer money? Now that is a bribe in the grift department of bribes. Damn, these guys can’t govern, but they sure can steal without a blush. I wonder if Riverview is not like trump or Santos, they just say they have 230 million or whatever, but don’t really have two nickles to rub together. Where the hell is Joop and the EB5 boys so they can get learned on a new way of grift.
You fellows are so darned skeptical about these matters.
Welfare queens are entitled to millions while hungry kids are deliberately shafted. Sorry, kids. We have white men to finance. Hey, kids, get a job. The plant is hiring. You know, the one the taxpayers pay for so that you can drop out of middle school and bust your chops to enrich the rich. Maybe, if you earn an afternoon off in a year or so, you can get a ride to the DSS building to see if you qualify for TANF.
This makes me seriously contemplate using a stopwatch everyday at work to calculate when to cease to lift a finger for those hours of my wage that go to enrich the rich. If we all refused to continue to be productive during those corporate welfare paycheck hours, we would get the message across immediately that LABOR ISN’T FREE in SD. It disgusts me to know I am sweating and busting my hump to pollute the environment, underpay minorities, and put fat stacks in Noem’s crony’s bank account.
On the other hand, I would gladly kick it into high gear during those calculated work hours that I knew paid to help feed the hungry.
I do not have an issue with CAFO’s. I do have an issue with these tax breaks as any business plan can be manipulated to show it needs a tax break to make the plan work.
These tax breaks should be reserved for smaller SD owned businesses who truly need some help to get going. For these large out of state businesses, these should be loans that get paid back to the local small governments like townships and counties whose roads far beyond the CAFO will be greatly impacted.
The wealthy’s appetites are never sated and that is a well known fact. Like a baby bird fallen out of the nest, you stick a morsel of welfare in front of it, its mouth pops open and it screams for more.
Good for the Arnold family. Sell that land before the value drops. Good for Riverview. Build that CAFO before they’re obsolete. Good for Hamlin County. Collect those millions before they’re unavailable. (But Hamlin will never have anything as cool as the round barn on Hiway 81 where a drunk German went insane. #grins Kones Korner sold me warm Hamm’s beer when I was fourteen. Often.) #DoubleGrins
My series of posts on Dakota Free Press about the nuclear waste fight 40 years ago led me to touch on the crisis in agriculture that was breaking out at the same time. It strikes me how government and banks today are willing to throw money at really speculative ag development, while back then no one could see their way to correcting the ag lending issues that were destroying otherwise solid small farmers. The South Dakota Legislature was contemplating several ideas to bail out or shore up the small farmers, but Janklow vetoed one approach that passed the Legislature. I think it was around this time I started hearing the term “ag industry,” when before we talked about “farmers and ranchers.” Words that we use when talking about the work of a community matter. It’s as if South Dakota started giving up on itself back then, which is why lots of people lost their farms and why we had a decade of fighting over wastes of various kinds.
May a plague of crickets and toads descend on these inbred folks.
grudz- just what makes us “skeptics” in your warped conservative mind?? Aren’t we seeing the truth instead of the grifts and gifts theat you the GOP Republicans in SD dare so prolific at passing out to GOP donors in our SD state? You make us one of the world’s most soicialist of the United States of America….
My grandfather bought and sold farms and farmland thrughout his life. He did it as an investment and for what we would call today, flipping. I witnessed his trading a two year old Buick Roadmaster Deluxe, for an alfalfa field south of Highmore. “He wanted the car and I think, with the dam going in at Pierre, that whole region should boom. I’ll find somebody to work the alfalfa, do some replanting, and there’s plenty of buyers in the neighborhood, Anyway, I want a station wagon.” he told me. That for me, when I was about 12, summed up the free enterprise system.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/01/there-are-ghosts-in-the-land-how-us-mega-dairies-are-killing-off-small-farms
“They never seem to stop”, a Dumont MN crop farmer’s comment about the enormous growth of Riverview as MN has lost 1100 dairy farms in just 5 years between 2012 and 2017. A Riverview official visited this farmer in April 2019 and shared a plan to build a 24,000-cow dairy a mile away. The official offered to buy the farmer’s corn for feed, and to sell manure to him as fertiliser. The offer was declined. “I said, I’m not very interested in that because you’re not paying enough for the product, and you’re charging too much for the manure.”
Kristi is starting to make Rounds and Joop Bolen look like pikers!